Here's The Technology That's Going To Make Your Phone's Internet 1,000 Times Faster Than 4G

In today's world, there's one area of technology that can almost
never be fast enough: the wireless networks that power our mobile
devices.

Despite
decades of advancements, we still lose signal when walking around
in a big city like New York or San Francisco.

Or when attending a popular sporting event — individual towers
just can't handle thousands of people trying to move data at
once.

But a hot startup with some major engineering talent is hoping to
change all of that.

Founded in 2011, Artemis is a startup working on pCell, a new
wireless standard that it thinks could leapfrog 4G altogether.

Like any new, potentially disruptive technology, pCell has a ton
of hype and uncertainty around it. We've put together the
following guide to pCell for those who want to know more without
any of the confusion or tricky marketing language.

What is pCell?

Cell towers as we know them today can be visualized as giant
umbrella tops. You deploy them, and they broadcast a bubble of
reception that gets weaker as you get farther away. They have to
be far enough away from each other so as to not cause
interference, but close enough together that you can move between
their areas of coverage and still have cell service. If you have
too many people in one place, their data use can bog down a tower
for everyone.

Artemis' technology takes a very different direction. Rather than
carefully spacing out a relatively small number of towers,
Artemis wants to deploy a massive number of boxes the size of
routers — called "pWaves" — that will provide much better service
to a much smaller area.

Rather than working against interference, pCell embraces the
collision of radio waves. By combining the incoming signals from
several of the pWave base stations, each pCell user is given the
equivalent of their own "personal cell" (hence the name) — which
basically means getting full bars of LTE at all times becomes the
new standard, while "good" signal strength means getting a signal
that's as much as 1,000 times faster than what we're all
used to.

pWaves are small enough to
deploy in a number of unobtrusive locations.Artemis

How is pCell better than 4G or LTE?

Besides speed and signal strength, it uses a lot less power.
pWave radios use a 1-milliwatt transmitter to deliver data,
compared with the 250 milliwatts used by most Wi-Fi radios and
even larger amounts of power used by cellular towers.

They also use less power on the user's end, too: phones as they
exist today would waste far less power searching for a signal,
and one day "pCell Native" devices could use parts that use even
less power than the Wi-Fi chips built into devices like the iPod
Touch today.

Going back to the carrier side of things, pCell also brings
significant reductions in the amount of infrastructure needed to
power a cell network. Unlike cell towers, which need a massive
fiber infrastructure to provide enough bandwidth for all their
users, pWaves can be deployed in enough locations that each unit
can "see" another unit, meaning they can bounce data around using
line-of-sight radio waves for far less money. And instead of
using custom hardware to handle all signal processing, a carrier
using pCell can run the software behind it on any sufficiently
powerful Linux computer.

Will I need a new phone to use pCell?

Nope. To make adopting the technology as easy as possible,
Artemis engineered pCell to work with regular LTE devices — so
when it's ready, your iPhone or Android device should already be
compatible. That also means you'll be able to use your phone on a
pCell network and still have it work when you go somewhere that's
still running regular LTE cellular service.

With that said, there will be some devices made "pCell Native"
that will use less power (and thus get better battery life) than
regular LTE-compatible devices.

How long until I can use pCell?

The first consumer launch of pCell is scheduled for the fourth
quarter of 2014, with the initial rollout taking place in San
Francisco. Artemis is working with a wireless partner to deploy
pWaves to as many as 350 rooftops in the city, which should be
more than enough to blanket the city — for the lucky few who get
to try it out, that is.

From there, Artemis says that full pCell deployment will begin at
some point early next year. In a
demo last month at Columbia University, Artemis CEO Steve
Perlman claimed that the technology could be deployed in all
major markets by the end of 2015, but we're doubtful; even the
most exciting technologies need to prove themselves before
companies will be willing to spend billions building them out
into their nationwide infrastructures.

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